“Confusion can occur because beginning and ending dates for ‘periods of war’ in many nonofficial sources are often different from those given in treaties and other official sources of information, and armistice dates can be confused with termination dates,” the December 28, 2011 CRS report said.

A different kind of confusion can arise when misleading or mistaken information is presented as fact, as when President Bush declared in a May 1, 2003 address to the nation that “major military combat actions in Iraq have ended.”

The CRS report does not address covert action or other unacknowledged military operations.

Some other noteworthy new or newly updated reports from the Congressional Research Service include the following (all pdf).